that the archaic fellow from Punin or Florida or Lower California or the Lagoa Santa caves was our earliest man—and quite early at that. Just how early, the bones do not yet say. 7 THE ARTIFACTS OF EARLY MAN IN THE NEW WORLD _Artifact, oh, artifact!_ _Spear point or scraper or hand-axe—_ _First tool of man,_ _Ancestor of steam shovel and power lathe,_ _Dynamo and bomb._ —EMIL NACHAHMER Artifacts from Heaven “Thunderbolts of God”—from England to Japan and from Norway to Africa, that was how men once explained the stone axes and arrowheads which they found buried in the earth. The philosophers and scientists of the Renaissance dug a little deeper, and one of them came up with the verbose and remarkable suggestion that these stones were made “by an admixture of a certain exhalation of thunder and lightning with metallic matter, chiefly in dark clouds, which is coagulated by the circumfused moisture and conglutinated into a mass (like flour with water), and subsequently indurated by heat, like a brick.”[1] Some found a simpler explanation: these artifacts were iron tools petrified by time. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Michele Mercati, physician to Pope Clement VIII, saw the truth: “They have been broken off from hard flints by a violent blow, in the days before iron was employed for the follies of war; for the earliest men had only splinters of flint for knives.”[2] The English historian William Dugdale said much the same thing in _Antiquities of Warwickshire_. The theory was not generally accepted, however, until the Spaniards found American Indians making arrowheads and stone axes without the aid of thunder, lightning, or God. The Folsom Point—Unique and Potent Quite a different thunderbolt—and a potent one—was the spear point that J. D. Figgins, of the Denver Museum of Natural History, found in 1927 between the ribs of an extinct bison near Folsom, New Mexico. It was a thunderbolt that destroyed, startlingly and for all time, thirty years of opposition to the presence of early man in the Americas. [Illustration: _A spear point, or possibly a scraper, found near Trenton, New Jersey, in 1872. Except for lack of retouching on the edges, it resembles the Mousterian point on page 90, but it is a little longer—5¾ inches. This implement was found on the surface, but it was said to be identical with some discovered with human bones in the glacial gravel beds below. (After Abbott, 1872.)_]